Meeting Each Others Emotional 
Needs in Marriage

How can couples meet each other’s emotional needs better? How can couples prevent emotional infidelities from happening in their marriage? When two people become bonded through marriage they depend on one another for their emotional needs getting met. But what happens later on down the road? Let’s take a look.

* Lack of Intimacy – Intimacy becomes lost because couples have stopped having intimate conversations and alone time with one another. Understand that intimacy and sex is not the same thing. Sex can be intimate, but you can also be intimate without having sex. Intimacy is the closeness a person feels with another. Watching a movie and eating popcorn together on the couch can be an intimate moment between couples.

* Rejected Feedings - When a spouse exerts their opinion, thoughts and ideas and the other spouse invalidates those feelings, a spouse can feel rejected and unneeded. You can keep the fires burning in your marriage by agreeing and supporting one another. Marriage should not be “her way” or “his way” but “both your way”, teamwork. How good and pleasant when fellow believers live together in unity.  (Psalm 133:1)  

And...if you do not agree with your spouse, understand there are proper ways to disagree without harming the emotional stability of the other. Try compassion, compromise, and being nicely assertive. There is no need for contrariness in marriage. If you disagree on something Christ taught, then please get your bibles out and study the scriptures together and pray that God give you wisdom to discern the scripture for what they mean. 

* Lack of Intimate Conversation – Do you know the person you married? One reason we lose touch with our spouse is because we stop having intimate conversations. We want to feel comfortable talking with and being with the person we married, but did you know that many couples feel uncomfortable being with each other. What causes that? Lack of bonding (intimate attachment) with one another and fear of feelings being rejected. 

* Lack of Same Goals, Aspirations  – Most marriages have the husband doing his own thing, and he has his own friends and hobbies, and the wife does her own things, friends and hobbies. They are pulling away from each other rather than working to be together and applying teamwork in the marriage. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)

* Confusion of Roles – In marriage the husband has his roles and responsibilities that should be attended to and the wife has hers. Together they make a team because they compliment each other’s position in the marriage. But when the wife tries to overthrow her husband’s manly protection and position in the marriage, the balance of the marriage becomes upset. It works the other way too.  Couples should be working with and encouraging each other so as to compliment each other’s position in the marriage.

* Lack of Spiritual Oneness – It’s ironic how God brings couples together in marriage, and how couples usually drift apart from each other. They are not basing their marriage on God’s truths and principles. Couples need to pray together every day. Reading of the bible and prayer together is a must for a healthy and balanced marriage.

What Happens When The Above Emotional Needs Do Not Get Met

* Lose Love For One Another - Couples lose interest with each other and think they are not in love anymore. Couples desperately need to be encouraging and supportive with the person they married. Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2)

* Building and Harboring of Resentments – When emotional needs don’t get met we tend carry around a negative attitude about the person we married. Faults and weaknesses of our spouse become magnified. We may clam up and think bad of the person we married or we may become angered and say mean things to our spouse, or worse, become violent.

Resentments will kill your marriage. Do not let the sun go down in your anger and resentment. Talk about your issues right away. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. (Colossians 3:13)

* Emotional and Physical Infidelities – When a spouse feels unloved, rejected, or dismissed because of the lack of intimacy and spiritual oneness in the marriage, couples go outside the bounds of the marriage to get those needs fulfilled. But this does not work. Let me tell you why.

For you to receive what you need from your spouse, you have to also compromise or sacrifice a part of yourself to “give” back to your spouse. It works both ways—couples need to work together and apply the principles that were designed for marriage. It does not matter whom you are interacting with on an intimate level, you will also need to do the same with them for it to be a happy union.

God teaches us to love on principle not on how we are feeling, but sometimes that is difficult to do. Feelings tell us to go to the other side of the fence for the emotional needs that are lacking in our marriage—this is why there is so much infidelity in marriage.  God tells us to go to Him and pray about our circumstances and ask Him for the guidance and answers we need. Which way are you going?

Love must be sincere. Feelings should never be the based on how you love another. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8)

Copyright 2009 Heaven Ministries ~ Marriage Ministry

Who Is Your Spouse Talking To 
on the Internet?

A note to our readers: We are not saying that face book is "why" people are unfaithful. But it is a tool that promotes secrecy and temptation. In other words, if someone is going to be unfaithful in their marriage they don't need face book to do it. Unfaithfulness starts in the heart!!

There is a lot of talk about unfaithfulness in marriage. I’ve written my fair share about cheating spouses and infidelity in marriage. This article will focus on a different kind of unfaithfulness, emotional infidelity. What is emotional infidelity? Emotional infidelity is interacting with others, besides the person you are married to, on an intimate and emotional level. 

Emotional infidelity is not a new issue, it has been going on for years, but since the advent of computers it has become a more prevalent practice among men and women, many of whom are married. It is so easy to just get online and meet people in chat rooms, dating sites, forums, and email that relationships can be sparked without even getting up from your computer desk. It starts out harmless, but eventually leads up to something other than just innocent chat. 

Emotional unfaithfulness happens when one or both spouses are emotionally disconnected from one another. In other words, when they feel they are not getting the validation and support they need from each other, they seek out someone who will give it to them. 

The Internet is a convenient and easy way to meet other people that will help you feel better about yourself. The strangers on the other end of the conversation will feed the empty spaces of your heart, giving you reason to continue the relationship. But is this a wise thing to be doing if you are married? 

Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes, for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread, and the adulteress preys upon your very life. (Proverbs 6:25 NIV

Internet relationships can be dangerous. You never really know who you are divulging your private and personal information to. Whoever it is you are interacting with, they too have a need to reveal themselves for the thrill of emotional intimacy, and then sometimes not revealing who they really are. I’ve heard of a case where a woman thought she was talking to a man for over six months, and together they shared secrets, intimate and romantic about each other through email. Come to find out, it was another woman she was getting steamy with all along. 

Internet predators, of all kinds, stalk the Internet, looking for innocent, vulnerable and naïve victims to captivate and do what they want with. If they want to meet with you somewhere on a physical level, I’d be VERY leery of that. Even though these relationships are not sexual in the physical sense, it can still become sexual in every other sense of the word. This is why it is called emotional unfaithfulness because it is just as unfaithful as the sexual act, if not worse. 

Lust is sin. It is impossible to fall in love with someone you have never met. Feelings tell you that something feels good and you may automatically think it is love. Just because something feels good, doesn’t make it right. The feelings you are feeling are lustfulness mixed with hopefulness, mixed with a little bit of euphoria. 

I believe that with the proper communication between husbands and wives there wouldn’t even be the temptation to involve themselves with the opposite sex. And of course, as innocent as it may seem at first, it is still wrong to become intimate with someone other than who you are married to. So where does God fit into all of this? Where does He fit in?

For EVERYTHING in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. 
(1 John 2:16-17 NIV)